If given time, I could easily come up with more, but:
A good friend of mine recently convinced me to read his beloved fantasy series, The Wheel Of Time by Robert Jordan. I am three books in, and while fantasy is not really my bag, it’s entertaining me so I’ll keep reading.
However, Jordan wrote this: Mat’s hunger knawed at him as if he had swallowed weasels.
I very nearly threw the book. The rest of the novel read nothing at all like this sentence. It was like a bucket of water thrown in my face. I must have re-read it ten times to make sure he really meant to say what it was that I had thought I read. Douglas Adams could have pulled that sentence off, but Robert Jordan, no.
I think that reading any Steven King novel makes it pretty evident from the start that he has logarhia. He just lets his fingers move across the keyboard in a stream of consciousness sort of way, ruminating over possibilities in the back of his head as random lengthy and unwieldy sentences drift out for pages and pages until finally he has an idea for a new scene or character and so moves out of the current quagmire into a new one, upon which he will proceed to vomit out words and sentences until…
I tried Memoirs of a Geisha. I wasn’t impressed. The author wasn’t very good at mixing up his sentences. They all started with a subject. They didn’t have a lot of subclauses. They were all about the same length. Perhaps he should have been a poet.
A sentence from Dean Koontz has stuck with me for many years. In From the Corner of His Eye, a husband is worrying about his wife. I think she was pregnant, but I don’t remember for sure.
Anyway, he’s very concerned about her*. She’s in the kitchen baking pies, and Dean writes that the husband “loitered in her vicinity.” Isn’t loitering in someone’s vicinity something that pervs do? It sounds like something from a police report.
*Which is how most horror writers foreshadow that it ain’t the wife we should be worried about.
Yes! This was exactly what I was looking for. Sage Rat* is just talking about bad writing in general. I want those slap in the face moments where a good or decent writer (there’s monumental shoe-horning necessary to get Dean Koontz in either of those categories, but that’s neither here nor there) seems to hand their typewriter to their big truck drivin’, hard drinkin’ big brother and say “Hey, you give it a try”.
*It was his implication that King was a bad writer, not mine. I would disagree, but that’s been done to death.
My sister insists that “Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James is a very interesting short story. I would give my opinion, but I cannot decipher a single sentence of that word vomit.
I’ve noticed that Stephen King, who writes some of my favorite books, has a tendency to write penis metaphores. “It stiffened, like a dick going hard,” is one that particularly sticks in my mind.
I don’t remember the name or author, but it involved two young sisters and a car in a field somewhere. I thought it was written by some amateur but the woman who wrote it teaches English and writing courses at one of the major southern California universites. (The rear book cover said which one but I don’t recall…it’s been ten years.)
Anyway, she’s trying to set a scene and she says, “It hung like a chrysalis on the underside of a branch of a tree”.
I couldn’t take the book seriously after that and returned it.
Maria Snyder’s Poison Study, which was sort of a hybrid fantasy/romance novel, was running along swimmingly until a paragraph about 90% of the way through. Up until then, the prose had been perfectly serviceable and intelligent; the main character was a smart, sensible woman; the attraction between her and the love interest was slow-building and subtle. And then came the paragraph which described the consummation of their attraction.
I ask you, WHAT? I just…I mean…gaaaaah, gag me. There are only 24 pages left to read after that, and I haven’t yet recovered from the horror of that paragraph to do it.
I have to admit that I loathe Henry James, and “The Beast in the Jungle” in particular (it’s a story where nothing happens, and the point is that nothing happemns. But it takes so damned long to not happen. The titular Beast in the Jungle is a metaphor, and we never evebn get to see it show its metaphorical fangs.), but I’m not sure it belongs in this thread. The writing seems pretty consistent throughout, up to James’ customary good writing (or, if you’re like us, intolerable dense) level. It’s not as if, to use SuntanTiger’s metaphor, Henry handed over control to his cousin Earl and let him try his hand.
That might’ve been interesting. we might have had a couple of short sentences not crammed with introspection and subordinate clauses that we could’ve hacked our way through to a clear meaning.
Some readers might think it’s odd to dump a book over one clumsy sentence, but it’s a big ol’ warning sign. Somebody got lazy or stopped caring, and there will likely be more, so just stop now and save yourself the aggravation.
That might not be a terrible sentence to another reader, and the rest of the book might be fine, and taste is subjective, yadda yadda. It’s like sitting down to a nice dinner and biting into a piece of tinfoil. You’re not likely to finish the dinner, let alone enjoy it, even if the waiter brings you a new plate.
The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson is one of the more astounding works of fiction in the English language…if you can deal with the writing style.
Ditto for The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison. Totally worth it, but very heavy-duty. (For those of you who think Tolkein’s writing is turgid, you ain’t seen nothing.)
Actually came in to say Tolkein, who I love but don’t go near anything from the Silmarillion on, but yes, even more so on the Eddison. Is it really worth it? Cause I couldn’t get past the first 20 pages.
I read Shogun a few years ago. This post is not about that. I thought it was one of the best books I ever read.
After that I read Tai-Pan. Might have been a good book…except tons and tons of the dialogue was written in dialect. A lot of pigdin. Which means one of the most important conversations in the book - the discussion between the Tai-Pan and Jin-Qua (I think that was the one) was entirely in pigdin. I never was so angry, so offended, and so irritated at a book. I don’t like dialectizing to start with, and this was almost unreadable. Hang on, I have a few clips in my LJ:
Here’s Brock’s dialogue, speaking to Struan:
And Jin-Qua and Struan talking:
Pages and pages of this fucking shit.
I finished it. I slogged through it. The pigdin alone made me want to throw it away. I only finished it because Shogun didn’t get good until halfway through. I figured, any minute now.
What a fucking let down.
Pidgin. My favorite book of all time is The Dollmaker by Harriett Arnow. I’ve recommended it quite often, and a few people have said that they’d check it out, but I don’t know if they have, or if they did but couldn’t get past the dialect. It’s not bad, but it’s unusual – “th” for “the”. I’ve never seen that done before and I can’t imagine how it would sound when spoken, and I’m afraid it might put people off the book, which is freakin’ awesome.
Right around the time I was graduating from high school, I read the World of Tiers series by Phillip Jose Farmer. Not the greatest thing I ever read, but they were okay adventure yarns. I remember, even at that unsophisticated age, being put off by his egregious use of onomatopoeia. The one that particularly irritated me was his repeated description of arrows as “slissing” and “kukking.”
No, the oops is on me. I didn’t mean to correct your spelling (didn’t even notice it until this post). That was me being lazy in starting my post, with a one word description. Really lazy, because what Arnow did isn’t pidgin but dialect, and I don’t think they’re the same thing.
See, dialect is a pain in the ass. The author might as well write ‘A thick pirate’s brogue sounded from the quarterdeck: “Avast and hoist the yardarm, boy, then off to the forecastle with you!”’ I can hear it all pirate-y in my head and I don’t need to sit and try to figure out what ‘th’ or ‘orf’ or or ‘ye’ are supposed to mean.
Pidgin, though, what would you have Mr. Clavell do with this: “Plenty more Longstaff hav, never mind. Werry bad when mandarin mad hav.”? I suppose ‘“Longstaff has several other ships in reserve, so I humbly suggest you pay his current troubles no mind. The more pressing issue is that the Mandarins have a bee in their bonnet and are liable to bring this whole mess down upon our heads,” the chinaman said in his characteristically broken English.’
Sorry, but I had the same reaction. To me the whole book just sounded like someone who was trying to write the correct accent, but just couldn’t pull it off. I did plough through it anyway, but for the most part I was just taken right out of the book.
